


Beloved of the Sea.

by Michaelssw0rd



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Loki (Marvel), BAMF Tony Stark, Evil Odin (Marvel), FrostIron- Freeform, Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, M/M, Merman Loki, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Odin Gets What He Deserves, Sea Monsters, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 04:54:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14325027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Michaelssw0rd/pseuds/Michaelssw0rd
Summary: “Does the Odin King live?”“Yes.”A cry of rage echoes through the sea, a storm brews from deep within it, because the water asks a question to allow safe passage, and this isn’t the right answer.(Or the story of a prince who is bound to the sea, and a mortal who falls in love with it.)





	Beloved of the Sea.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [enkiduu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enkiduu/gifts).



> For Enki who is as lovely as people can be. Lovelier. (and so so inspiring). This is for her, for making the Mer!Au take root in my head because of her wonderful Mer!Aus. And for being such a lovely beta, making me VERY HAPPY along with beating my sentences into some semblance of coherence. Thank you.
> 
> I also gotta thank dailyfrostironrec for their lovely September (omg) prompt: [Merperson AU](https://dailyfrostironficrec.tumblr.com/post/164859359664/september-2017-prompt)... and of course [Leena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xLostLenore), for reading the disastrous first draft as I wrote it and telling me it was worth finishing. <3

“Does the Odin King live?”

“Yes.”

A cry of rage echoes through the sea, a storm brews from deep within it, because the water asks a question to allow safe passage, and this isn’t the right answer.

There’s a saying that nobody really _says,_ but anyone who spends long enough time near the sea knows of it nonetheless.

It says, beware of the color of the water, and fear it.

The sea changes colors: red, at the break of dawn and at the setting of the sun, a reflection of the blood it has washed away over the years; blue, like clear skies, calling the sailors to set sail for an adventure of a lifetime; black, like the night that drowns the sun and is still hungry for more.

But green.

When the water shimmers green, dazzling and beautiful, like an oasis from a desert dweller’s dream, that is when one should be really and truly afraid.

Because when the water turns green, Loki comes.

Tony Stark is born at sea, and it is the only home he knows.

He has a house, vast and magnificent, built on a rock facing the sea with its walls made of glass, and when Tony is trapped within it, all he does is stand with his hand pressed to the glass and long to be home.

Because Maria Stark went into labor in the middle of a voyage and gave birth to a child that was necessary as an heir, but not wanted as a son. Tony breathed in the damp, salty air, and discovered that the sea loved the way it was, selfless and endless.

So he sails.

He studies, and learns and sits through more business meetings than he cares for, and presses his hand against the glass, telling himself soon… soon.

And as soon as he can, he takes a boat that he has built with his own hands, the boat that gets bigger and better with every passing year, and sails.

They tell him to be careful. They tell him to stay away from the sea.

They tell him that the sea has an appetite as deep and endless as itself and it swallows everyone who ventures into it.

Tony laughs at the comments and shakes his head, pulling up his sails and tastes freedom in the salt he breathes.

“Why aren’t you afraid?” Rhodey asks him one day, when Tony comes back with a wrecked boat and a smile so bright that it’s more blinding than the sun glinting off the surface of the water.

“How do you fear what you love?” Tony looks back at the crashing waves with eyes too fond for something so vicious, already longing to be back to where he was almost killed; to the only place where he felt loved.

“The sea is a monster.” Rhodey claps his shoulder and stares into his eyes, wanting to make his friend _see,_ to make him _fear,_ so that he may live.

Tony shrugs off the hand, and pulls his bag up over his shoulder, feet weary as he walks away from his home towards his house. “Aren’t we all?”

Soon, he tells himself as he watches the sun set over the beloved horizon, soon.

In a golden castle, deep inside Asgard, so deep that even the sea air barely reaches it, lives the Odin King. He has lived there for as long as anyone can remember, ruling the land with a detached impartiality, hindering any progress and growth, until the world is as stagnant as he is, easy to rule because the people don’t know any better, can’t hope for any better.

“It’s not so bad,” they say, as they struggle to feed themselves while the King throws feasts every other day. “It could be worse,” they repeat as the rain abandons the land leaving the land to crack the way their skin does.

Everything eventually dies—the plant, the animals and the people—but the Odin King lives, on and on. There are whispers in the streets that he can’t be killed, that once a rebel thrust a spear inside his heart and the King just laughed and pulled it out, before thrusting it in the rebel’s throat; that the King is immortal.

It’s only half the truth.

In the castle also lives Odin’s wife, Frigga, who is kind where the King is cruel, who is gentle where the King is harsh, and who is helpless while the King is all powerful, and who sometimes sits on a windowsill and sings a melody that is full of longing for something one has lost, or someone. There also lives Thor, their son, whose hair glows gold in the sun and whose cape is as red as the blood he spills in the wars he win, and whose eyes sometimes wander around as if he is searching for the horizon that is obscured by all the land that surrounds him.

They say there used to be another son in the castle, once, and that’s who Frigga weeps for when she sings, and that’s who Thor’s eyes look for whenever they wander. They say he died young.

It’s only half the truth.                                  

The whole truth is crueler than the people want to remember, harsher than they can stomach, so they make themselves forget it. They forget about the boy with limbs too long and eyes too green, who looked like he didn’t belong on the land; who dove in the water and swam and swam until he looked more fish than human. They also forget about the prophecy that named him Odin’s bane, that foretold of the day he would take the head of his own father and end the reign of a heartless King.

They forget his name.

His name is Loki.

“Does the Odin King live?”

When the water shimmers green and when Loki appears with his hair as dark as the coal burning in the ship’s core and his tail flipping behind him, restless in the way the waves are, that’s what he asks.

That’s the price of traversing the sea. That is the admission cipher. And yet, nobody ever bothers finding out the answer.

So the young sailor has it coming when he shakes on the bow and stammers, “Yes.”

It’s the truth. Loki knows it to be so, because he is still here, trapped in the water and unable to leave, unable to rip the heart out of the man who stole him away from his home like a war trophy and failed to raise him like a son, the man who incarcerated him for a crime he had not yet done. So the Odin King lives. That is true.

The truth isn’t _right._

The people who dare to cross Loki’s territory should know that, should learn the difference between what is true and what is right, and for that crime Loki sings for the waves to take what has always been theirs, to sink what they were merely allowing on their surface. He flips his tail and brings forth a storm.

And then waits for the one who will come forth with the answer he’s waiting for.

Soon, he tells himself, it has to be soon.

The Starks are builders, always have been. They build things.

So Tony builds roads and structures and houses for people that a few manage to turn into homes; he builds vehicles that work the most efficiently, and machines that don’t break, and buildings that still stand strong when everything else withers with age.

He’s the best damn engineer you can find, and everyone knows it. He can turn iron into clay in his hands and mold it into shapes nobody else can dream of; they call him the Man of Iron, and the name tastes like rust on his tongue.

When he has the chance, he builds boats. Nobody buys them, because they aren’t for sale.

Those he doesn’t make sturdy. He never means to fight the ocean. And as the iron in the hull rusts as water eats away at it, his title feels all the more fitting with the tang of sea water in his mouth and the wind in his hair.

He never dreams of resisting the waves, so overjoyed whenever they allow him a ride on their surface, knowing that water erodes the land and wins. Always. It is the way of the water from the dawn of time.

And the Odin King starts getting nervous.

They have tried to build a wall before. It doesn’t work.

The moment the first brick is set, the tides attack with a vengeance, crashing against the shore and taking anyone who dared defy them as their prisoner, suffocating them in the depth of their embrace. After a while, people stop trying.

From the golden castle deep within Asgard, the King watches, as day after day, his doom moves closer. He condemned the boy who wasn’t his son—the boy who was his bane—to the vast and welcoming waters, never able to step on land, and hence never able to fulfill the destiny that had been foretold for him. He bound Loki to the sea, from where he couldn’t come for him.

He had never expected Loki to bring the whole sea to him, closer and closer, slowly making his world shrink around him.

So when Odin hears of the Man of Iron, and when he stands at his tallest tower and feels like the waves could reach for him, grab his ankle and pull him into their dark depths, he sends out the call.

“Does the Odin King live?”

The pirate captain stares Loki in the eyes, sky blue meeting deep emerald. He has heard the tales of the water turning green, of the question that dooms every person who hears it, and of the siren that can call upon the waves like a mother duck to its children.

He is not afraid of a _fish._

“No,” he answers, because he learned to lie when he was a child who stole coins from the butchers shop and blamed it on the stable boy, because somebody had to feed his dying sister and it wasn’t going to be their father. He knows that truth never saves anyone.

“Liar,” Loki snarls, his tail lashing out and striking the hull of the ship and making it quake. The ocean responds to the rage inside of him, bubbling from the bottom of it, a maelstrom to match the one in Loki’s heart, hungry, always hungry. It surrounds the ship, circles it, and Loki watches the ship give in to the vengeance of nature, sinking to the bottom where the light of the sun will never reach it.

The liars are the worst. Trying to trick Loki, trying to tell him that the destiny that has bound him so, tormented him so, was a lie; that Odin’s doom came at the hands of another.

No.

This is his destiny. His curse and his reward.

He has waited too long for it to be otherwise.

Uncomfortable truths have never been a problem for Tony. If they had been, he wouldn’t have embraced the business decision that was his birth with arms and eyes wide open.

And truth has a way of befriending the fearless.

So Tony remembers Loki.

He remembers the song the ocean sang in response to his first cry, a lullaby his mother never sang to him. He hears the way the winds wail in lament sometimes when he’s far enough away from the land to muffle its endless noise, the waves humming the tune of a trapped bird, lashing out against the walls repeatedly and uselessly. And he empathizes. He could be Loki.

In some ways, he is.

He hears the tales and reads the scrolls and tints his windows green so that when he looks at the sea, it always reminds him of the boy who didn’t belong to the land, the boy who was forcefully bound to the sea, the boy who was this kingdom’s doom, and its salvation.

Tony may just be infatuated.

Rhodey finds him one day in a museum, looking at the runes that told the story of the Odin family in a language few could read any longer. Tony has been trying to teach it to himself, in hopes of learning more about the boy with body of a fish, the boy who wasn't born that way. His fingers hover over a symbol which might be an _L_ , or it might just be something entirely different, and sighs when Rhodey comes to stand next to him.

“I want to meet him someday, Rhodes.”

“That’s your sleep deprivation talking, Tony. It encourages your insanity.”

“Don’t you ever think about it? Doesn’t it keep you up at night?” Tony’s eyes are bloodshot, and Rhodey may have a point about the sleep thing. “About the King, about his sons, the one that’s a celebrated murderer and the one that’s a condemned monster. Doesn’t it turn your stomach, knowing how cruel the ruler of our land can be towards his own lineage? How do you bear it, Rhodes? How…”

Rhodey touches his arm and steers him away. “It’s just a story, Tony. Nothing more. Odin only has one son. It’s been so for centuries.”

“No.” Tony shakes his head but allows himself to be led away. “How do you not hear him calling? How do you not _see?_ The storms in the ocean, the question, it’s all there.”

“There have always been storms in the ocean, Tony.”

“And there has always been Loki.”

Rhodey just sighs and leads him home, tucking him into his bed and turning off the lights. The moonlight outside looks a muted green through his tinted windows, and before Rhodey leaves, he hears him whisper again.

“I want to meet him.”

Rhodey looks at his friend who has always been as unpredictable as the sea he loved, and shakes his head. “You might regret that, someday.”

Tony signs the contract the King sends him.

Tony has heard the saying that nobody says but everyone knows. The day after he signs the contract, he takes his smallest boat and sets out to find the place where the water shimmers green. Where Loki appears.

This isn’t a fight.

This is a show of hands; a negotiation.

He takes his boat out deep into the unsafe waters and then lets it drift, letting the currents take it where they will; he isn’t worried about finding his way back home, for he is already there. He sits on the bow of the ship, his feet dangling in the air, and waits for the water to shimmer green.

He waits for Loki.

In some ways, he feels like he has always been waiting for him, daring the waters to take him to Loki with reckless abandon. But today, he won’t go unanswered.

A while later, the sea gets still in a warning that would send any sailor fleeing for their lives, but Tony is not a sailor. He’s a builder. He’s used to standing still while the world around him changes to accommodate him. So he leans back on his elbows and closes his eyes, letting the sun paint the inside of his eyelids gold and red.

When he feels the water lap at his feet, he smiles. It reminds him of a stray kitten that licked his toes, and then sank its claws in his feet when he ignored it too long. The sea acting like a temperamental cat is oddly fitting.

“Does the Odin King live?” The sound is carried by a breeze, all the more menacing for its softness. Tony wonders if he is the only one who has ever heard the melancholy in it.

He sits up, looks at the most exquisite creature he has ever seen, and falls in love.

In some ways he has always been.

He knows he’s staring. He stares at the way hair the color of iron ore he holds in his hands everyday frames Loki’s face, and wonders how the strands would look curled around his fingers; stares at the eyes that are greener than the precious emeralds he has stored in his locker, and wonders how the stones would look dangling around Loki’s neck in a string, threaded through his hematite hair; stares at the way his tail whips around, more powerful than any weapon he has ever created, and wonders if that’s what powers the sea, if that’s what powers the world.

“Loki,” he whispers, and it’s a greeting as well as a prayer, because the sea is the only thing that has ever heard him.

“Does the Odin King live, _Mortal_?” he snarls again, and this time the gales are stronger, not just caressing his face, but jarring him. Loki is annoyed; Tony’s smile grows larger. He’s helplessly fond.

Loki watches him smile and seems to deem him deranged, and maybe he is, unafraid of the creature that has brought doom to the countless fearless sailors and pirates alike. He swings his tail around in a way that would be threatening if Tony weren’t fascinated by the way the sun reflects through the fins, green and gold, and weren’t drawn to it, his fingers restless with the desire to know how it’d feel under his skin.

The stories say that Loki is a monster. They leave out the most important part, the most dangerous one. They don’t say that Loki is beautiful.

“Does th—“

“Not for long,” Tony answers, and for all he smiles, his words are solemn. A declaration and a promise all in one.

Loki has met a lot of mortals.

Loki has _drowned_ a lot of mortals.

It’s inevitable when you live for so long, until the rage of the sea becomes your own, until you forget where the sea’s hunger ends and yours begins.

Most of the men, when they look at him, can’t hide the way their knees shake or the fear in their eyes that is as instinctive as breathing... Those are wise men. It is wise to be afraid of what can kill you; it is sensible to fear death. But death doesn’t care for what you feel about it.

Other men look at him with hatred and disdain, eyes blazing with a fury that drives them like the fire that drives their ships, and they throw spears at him, and balls of fire. Loki doesn’t even evade them, relishes the way the mortal’s eyes widen when the spears break against his unbreakable skin, before he shows them what an attack really means.

And there are those who look at him and in their eyes he sees an emotion that brings forth maelstroms that ravage the ocean; that brings hurricanes that last days. Weeks. Loki has never dealt well with pity.

But when the man clad in a red coat, one that reminds him too much of a brother he never had, looks at him, Loki is taken aback. Because in all his centuries of living, he has never encountered something quite like this, and he can’t put a name to it.

It looks like the way dawn sometimes looks when it comes after a particular long night, breaking over the surface of water in colors far too numerous to name. It looks like stars twinkling bright in the sky on the nights the moon is hiding. What Loki doesn’t know is that it looks exactly like the way his own eyes looked when he stared at the sea, long ago when he used to walk on legs and still needed air to breathe.

“Not for long,” says the man in a boat too fragile with a jaw too strong and a smile too sincere.

“Oh.” Loki finds himself at loss for words, all the alphabets he knows are full of doubt and anger, and he has lost the ones that spell of hope. “And do you think you can slay the immortal tyrant?”

“No. But you can.” Loki’s ire doesn’t faze him, and he feels reluctant awe build in his chest and a notion that this mortal, he may regret killing. “And I need your help.”

They always need things, always wanting. Whether it be free passage, more gold or another day to live. Sometimes Loki thinks that the mortals have an appetite even bigger than the sea, yet unlike the sea, they give nothing back. “And why should I help you?”

The smile looks smug on his face, the way Loki knows his own looked when he drowned an armada sent solely to kill him. “Because you need my help too.”

“Keep your shores calm for me,” the mortal who smells of iron and rust says. “Trust me.”

Loki knows trust. He trusts that the waters will obey his command, and he trusts that tides will try to kiss the moon every night, and he trusts that Odin will live as long as he is trapped here, unable to reach him.

He doesn’t trust men.

But for once, he finds that he wants to.

Tony goes back the next day again. Loki hasn’t killed him yet even if he did flip his boat and bring forth a storm. He counts that as a win, and an invitation to try again.

Loki doesn’t come again, but he thinks he sees the green fin swishing in the distance, the tides rocking his boat in a way that’s almost familiar, and he throws his head back and laughs.

And goes again the next day.

And the next.

“I am not letting you build a wall around Asgard!” Tony is lying with his eyes closed, just soaking in the sunlight, when the voice jerks him out of his daze.

“I can’t build it without your help,” Tony says without opening is eyes, “and you can’t reach Odin without mine.”

“I will,” Tony turns towards Loki’s voice, unable to resist the sight his eyes had longed for ever since he first saw it days ago, “I will. One day the ocean will swallow all land and that’s the day Odin will die.”

“Maybe,” Tony agrees, because the water always wins. It is the way of water. “But are you willing to wait for as long as it would take?”

“I have waited this much.” Loki’s voice carries all the loneliness of centuries, and Tony’s heart aches for it.

“What if you don’t have to?” Tony reaches out, but he can’t touch the thing he wants to, so he compromises by just skimming his hand over the surface of water. It feels cool under his palm and wet, the way he thinks Loki’s scales will. “Let me help.”

The longing in the creature’s eyes is like a whirlpool sucking Tony in, and for a moment he thinks Loki will say yes, but then the eyes flash in outrage and Tony’s boat capsizes again.

“I don’t need your help, metal man.” He hears the snarl as he coughs out the water that went in through his nose and braces against the upturned boat. “I don’t need your betrayal.”

Tony floats in the water for a moment, enjoying the way it carries him when it can easily suffocate him if it wishes so—if Loki wishes so. And then he rights his boat and rows back to his house.

And comes back the next day.

“Calm your shores for me, Loki,” the man, who knows that you can bend any metal to your will if you strike it long enough, says. “Trust me.”

And Loki does.

They have tried to build a wall before. It doesn’t work.

The moment the first brick is set, the tides attack with a vengeance, crashing against the shore and taking anyone who dared defy them as their prisoner, suffocating them in the depth of their embrace.

But you see, the Starks are builders, always have been; and the first step of building something is having a permit. That’s what the previous builders forgot to do. They signed the papers sent by Odin, and thought they had the right to build a wall on Asgard’s shore.

The sea doesn’t belong to Odin. The sea is Loki’s, and so are its shores.

Tony Stark places the first brick to the terrified applause of the spectators. The Odin King is nowhere in sight—he doesn’t dare venture near the sea, trapped in a prison of his own making—but he sends his men who crowd around him, watching avidly. There’s also a man standing in the distance who doesn’t look at him when he places the brick and seals the start of the wall that is hoped to be the Asgard’s savior. This man’s eyes are glued the water, searching for something, someone, as his red cape billows softly in the gentle sea breeze.

The waves stay calm, almost receding to let the builder do his job. He has the sea’s consent.

When the applause gets louder, as do the sighs of relief, Tony turns around to the ocean and winks. He is almost confident that the ocean winks back.

“Does the Odin King live?”

Tony is reading a book, reclined against the ship’s side, when the familiar and much-loved voice breaks his concentration. Tony marks the page and closes the book, a smile on his face.

“Not for long,” he answers. It is still as sincere as it was the day he first said it, and the tilt of Loki’s lips tell him that he knows that too.

“You said that a year ago.” Loki swims closer, and braces his arms on the boat’s side, pulling himself up a bit. The boat lurches, but Loki is too beloved of the sea to ever be hurt by it, and Tony is beloved of Loki’s—or at least Loki tolerates him, which is almost the same thing, “I hope you haven’t forgotten the cost of lying to me, Iron Man.”

“Why do you call me that?” he asks instead of answering, because they both know Loki sounds too fond for the threat to have any real weight. Loki just likes throwing the words out because he likes the sound of them. No ship has drowned in this part of the ocean in the last ten months. “I told you my name is Tony.”

“Tony.” Loki wrinkles his nose. It is an unfairly adorable expression on a face that tries to look so stern. “It doesn’t taste right.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Tony places both his hands under his chin, resisting the temptation to cup them around Loki’s face.

“The words, they’re… senses. _Sun_ tastes hot and sometimes burns your tongue, _bird_ , tastes of air drying the water on your skin. Tony tastes like nothing. I like Stark better, it tastes sharp and pointed, like biting into it would draw blood, but it doesn’t taste like _you._ ”

Tony watches Loki talk animatedly, fascinated by the way the world looks to the immortal merman, and smirks at the last sentence, at the innuendo Loki doesn’t even know he has made. “And what do I taste like then?”

Loki tilts his head to a side and stares, until the teasing smile melts away from Tony’s lips and a heat grows in his belly. “Like rust,” Loki says.

“Thank you very much for that,” Tony huffs, not sure if he should be insulted.

Loki shakes his head, his black tresses dry in the air now and Tony can see the flash of green where Loki has braided the string of emeralds Tony had gifted to him a few months back. “It’s strong but unafraid; it tells of your fleeting love affair with nature, letting it touch you and change you, because you are of nature too. No, I think I will keep calling you Iron Man, if you don’t mind.”

Tony’s mouth runs dry, and he shakes his head. “No, that’s quite alright.”

Loki smiles, all teeth, as if he has never learned how to do things by halves. Tony wants to taste that smile. He wants to taste _Loki._

“What were you reading?” Loki asks, distracting him from his inappropriate thoughts.

“Just this story…” Tony shrugs, but he notices the way Loki’s eyes are lingering on the book with yearning. “Do you want to read?”

Loki shakes his head. “The language… I don’t understand it anymore. The words I know are all lost.”

“I’ll teach you,” Tony promises, like he promises the end of Odin’s reign. The Starks always keep their promises.

Loki always floated on the surface of water when he needed air to breathe, the water a soft bed under him, and afterwards, well, he was of water, made of it and made for it. Loki has never known drowning.

But he thinks this must be what it feels like.

The Iron Man becomes the center of the maelstrom that his life suddenly feels like, spinning him around and around, in an axis that constantly gravitates towards the taste of rust, sucking him in closer to eyes the color of earth that he hates so much, the color of earth that he misses so much. Loki despises himself for the pathetic way he listens to the waters, the way he has memorized the rise and fall of the tides when Stark maneuvers his boat because nobody else is so gentle and so callous all at once, and wonders what he will do when Stark stops showing up any more.

Sometimes, a few days pass, then a few weeks, and the sea grows violent again, churning with need to fill the empty void inside it that feels even more hollow now than it did before as Loki convinces himself that he has been betrayed, that he has been used and discarded and now there is a half made wall between him and his destiny, pushing it even further from his reach.

And then Iron Man shows up again.

Sometimes he comes with a stack of books that he has taught Loki how to read. Loki tells him he can’t take them under the water and Stark shrugs and says that he will just have to come again so that Loki finishes the story. Sometimes he brings with him yet another string of stones he has weaved, mostly in different shades green, and now Loki wears strings of emeralds in his hair and bracelets of jades in his wrists, and a ring of Peridot pierced into his ear. His favorite is the necklace of rubies woven in a gold thread that Stark showed up with a few months back, with a slight shake of his hands that he couldn’t hide and a vulnerability in his eyes that was very uncharacteristic of him. Loki had turned around and bared his neck in response, and had tried to ignore the way Stark’s fingers felt against his impenetrable skin: like if he pressed too hard it would break, the way it hadn’t broken when sharp blades lashed at it.

When Stark takes too long in showing up, Loki fiddles with the chain around his neck and feels reassured.

What he likes best though, are the days—weeks, months—that Iron Man shows up empty handed, with only a smirk on his face and a glint in his eyes. Those days, they talk.

They talk of Stark’s birth at sea, and of Loki’s birth in a land long lost to the war against Odin, of the changing world and of the things that never change, of birds and flowers and fish and air and wind and land and everything significant and insignificant. At times Stark tells him of a Queen that sits on a windowsill and mourns a son she never had, and of a warrior whose eyes are always seeking someone he once knew, and Loki hates him for it, _hates_ him, tilts his boat and dives underwater and refuses to surface until his heart stops feeling like it will burst from the pain of a memory he should no longer have.

And he loves him for it.

Sometimes, the words end, and there is an eerie silence as even the winds fall quiet. At those times Loki looks at Stark, and finds his eyes looking right back at him, dark and warm, and thinks that they don’t really talk at all. At least not about the things that matter, about the things that they both want.

So the wall climbs higher and higher every day, and Loki sinks lower and lower, drowning, until he is afraid he might never want to resurface again.

“This is madness, Tony.” Rhodey grabs his arm and turns him around, looking furious and wretched, the fear sharpening his tongue and firming his grip. He sees his friend wince at the way Rhodey’s nails are digging into his flesh and loosens his hold.

“Do you think he’ll like it?” Tony holds out a ring with a small iron anchor dangling from it, a sign of safety for a ship on dangerous shores but Tony had thrown his anchor down in the middle of a raging storm, and it had caught.

The symbolic ornament was oddly fitting.

“I know it’s iron, and it will rust, but he said he likes the taste of it, of rust, of how it speaks of our fleeting lives and our daring love affair with nature… so I hope he likes it, even if it doesn’t last too long. You know his skin doesn’t break unless he wants it to? He put that Peridot earring through his ear like it was nothing at all… so do you think he might? For this too? I am thinking belly button ‘cause, damn, that would be hot, but I am not picky.” He hums in consideration and then turns back to his work table, “Maybe I will put a diamond in there as well… to make it shine. He likes shiny things.”

“Why…” Rhodey helplessly clutches his hand in his hair, his eyes wide and panicked. “Why are you doing this, Stark?”

He doesn’t call him Stark, never does unless the situation is dire, but his friend doesn’t even notice it. “He’s letting me build a wall on his shores… and I am being paid for it with more than I can spend in ten lifetimes. It’s the least I can do.”

“It’s not his shores, Tony.” He pulls Tony around once more. “He’s a monster.”

Tony’s lips do that thing where they turn up but there’s no humor in in his eyes. “Aren’t we all?”

Sometimes you try and save someone from falling off a cliff; give them a hand to hold and pull as much as you can and hope you won’t topple over yourself; but even if you do… saving the life of the person you care for is worth it. But if the person doesn’t grasp the hand, the rope, you’re desperately dangling, and if he throws his hands up in joy and laughs at the freefall… well… you can’t save someone from themselves.

And Tony has always been his own worst enemy.

At the door, he stops, watching his friend immersed in shaping precious minerals into accessories for a creature that has lived longer than the minerals have been in the earth, and dismays.

“Why aren’t you afraid, Tony?” he asks whisper soft, not even sure if he wants an answer to that question, not sure if he can handle it.

He gets one nonetheless.

“How can you fear what you love?”

Tony can tell Loki’s moods by the way the current feels under the hull of his boat; he has learned to read the sea to read Loki. Loki might be the lie smith, but the waves can’t lie. Tony has heard Loki’s sadness in them when all the universe could see was his cruelty, and he has felt Loki’s joy in them when he pretends to be put off by Tony’s antics, and he has read Loki’s rage in them when he plasters on a smile, sickening sweet, and the waters grow still as the name of his father, his jailer, comes up.

Today… Loki is furious.

He doesn’t blame him… Tony would be angry too.

“Does the Odin King live?” He is greeted by their usual greeting, but today there’s a thread of malice in it that hasn’t been there in years.

He stands tall. It wouldn’t do to show weakness because weakness signals guilt. “Not for long.”

Loki’s head breaks through the surface and if Tony wasn’t braced for the anger already, he would’ve stumbled back in shock—this is what the wrath of the ocean looks like. “And how long is _long?_ ”

Tony doesn’t have an answer for that. He wishes he did… but it depends on the pull of the moon and the hunger of the ocean and the rage of Loki, all of them things that he can count on but nothing he can quantify. “Just a little while longer, Loki.” His last word is an entreaty, a plea, but Loki shakes his head, the beaded emeralds making the black look even more dark and threatening. Loki has always been all the more dangerous for his beauty.

“You take me for a fool, Mortal?” This time Tony can’t suppress his wince. He hasn’t been called _that_ since their first meetings. “You think I don’t know what they’re saying? You think I don’t know that the wall is nearly complete and reeks of iron and rust… reeks of you.”

“Trust me,” he whispers.

“I did,” Loki’s voice rings through the empty ocean air, loud, followed by a soft repetition that breaks in the middle. “I _did_.” His powerful tail pushes the boat until Tony is scrambling to stay upright, and then he feels Loki’s fin against his ankle, a soft caress that is all the more threatening for it. “And now I’m thinking it was the wrong thing to do.”

“It wasn’t.” Tony shakes his head, meeting Loki’s stare, hoping his eyes show the sincerity that Loki has always read in them.

“You know what I do to the liars, Iron Man… you know how they die wishing they hadn’t try to trick the trickster.”

“Do it then,” Tony offers, and Loki looks surprised by the offer. He doesn’t know why he is. Tony has never made a secret of this part: “I am not afraid of drowning.”

The fin against his leg wraps stronger, and Tony does his best not to wince. “You will die.”

“Yes,” Tony agrees, “And yet I promise you, I promise that Odin won’t live for much longer, whether I live to see the day or not. _Trust me_.”

Loki’s rage wavers for a moment, and Tony thinks he might’ve won, before it comes back in full force. The next thing Tony knows is a pull on his ankle that he doesn’t fight, and the water rushing to embrace him.

He opens his arms wide, and doesn’t close his eyes. He isn’t afraid of what he loves, isn’t afraid of his home, even if his fragile mortal body was never meant to live in it. He tries to hold his breath, for as long as he can, but then the needs of his wretched body overwhelm him, and he gurgles out the name that has been on his tongue for half a decade and hopes Loki can hear him.

His body sinks deeper, and he opens his mouth to breathe…

Cold lips press against his own and, rather than the rush of ice cold water that he is expecting, warm air enters his lungs, filling them up with shared oxygen. Tony lunges into the touch as much as the water around him allows, desperate for more, dying for more, and it’s not the oxygen he craves.

Loki gives it to him, pressing his mouth to Tony’s more harshly than anything he has ever felt before and much more welcome. It bruises, it bites, it leaves him aching and hurting for more of the pain because he had been longing for Loki’s lips for so long he doesn’t even care if this is the last thing he ever feels. There is nowhere else Tony would rather be than here, sinking lower in the ocean and his hands gliding over Loki’s slippery skin and his lungs breathing the air from Loki’s lungs.

He doesn’t know Loki has maneuvered them upwards until they break out of the water. Loki tries to pull back but Tony whines in his throat and doesn’t let go. Now that his limbs aren’t feeling leaden due to water he moves them to grab Loki’s hair in his fist—it feels as solid as hematite does in his palm, stronger—and keep him close... and bring him even closer until there is no space between the two of them. If there is space, there might be room for doubt, and Tony doesn’t want to question this. He only wants to feel.

When Loki fists his own hand in Tony’s hair and jerks his head back, Tony moans into the pain, his fingers managing to fiddle with the emerald string in Loki’s hair, caressing the iron anchor in Loki’s ear in reflection of the one Loki had embedded in Tony’s heart.

“You stupid, reckless, fool,” Loki snarls, but it sounds more like awe than disdain.

“Yes.” Tony tries to pull closer again, relishing the pain in his scalp as Loki holds him back, “Please.” Loki lets him go, and Tony surges towards his lips. When Loki turns his face, Tony’s lips find his jaw instead, his cheek, the hollow of his throat, his teeth bothering the skin that can break lances, his fingers pressing against the very pulse of the ocean itself.

He is hungry for it all, has been for far too long, and aches for more.

And Loki gives it to him.

“You will be the death of me, Tony Stark,” Loki takes his name as he takes him, and Tony is drunk on the feel of it, is sinking, and drowning and living all at once.

“Yes,” he groans into Loki’s teeth against his vulnerable throat, “Yes,” he begs as Loki’s fingers bruise where they hold too tight. “Yes,” he whimpers when Loki’s clever tongue traces scorching paths on his skin. “Yes,” he cries for whatever Loki will give him, cries for more, cries for everything. “Yes… yes… _yes… Loki_.”

“How long, Iron Man? How much longer?” Loki asks later, as Stark lies in his arms in a boat that’s half wrecked and barely holding them aloft.

“Soon.” Stark presses his lips to Loki’s skin and Loki thinks that this softness is worse than the piercing sharpness of a spear, that this softness might break him where whole armadas failed. “It will be soon.”

“And what shall I do in the meanwhile?”

“Rage.”

The thing with the ocean is… rock and iron and cement cannot stop it from existing, cannot stop it from rising, from raging.

So the rivers keep feeding the endless belly of the ocean, the rains keep replenishing it and the ice on the poles melts to help it rise, higher and higher, and Asgard has already sunk beneath the surface.

It just doesn’t know it yet.

The day the last brick of the wall is placed, the Odin King announces a feast. Tony smiles with a cruel tilt to his lips, and informs them he will be late.

And then he ventures out to the sea.

He doesn’t wait for Loki to come out to greet him, he doesn’t wait for Loki to ask the question. Instead, the moment he sees the shade of green tinting the water, he dives.

He is embraced by the cool water until warm arms wrap around him and Loki’s lips find his. This is the way he likes to say hello, through shared breaths and wandering hands.

When they come up for air, Loki rubs his finger against Tony’s swollen lip, and then cups his face, the other hand running gently through his hair.

“Does the Odin King live?” he asks, and there is a vulnerability to his voice, a doubt he doesn’t even want to admit, because he must’ve heard about the wall being complete; he must’ve heard about the feast in its honor.

Tony kisses Loki’s mouth once again, rough and harsh, the kind of love the ocean is used to, and then soft and gentle, the kind the ocean deserves.

“Not after today,” he murmurs against Loki’s lips because he wants to swallow the gasp at the answer. It’s the only feast he has been looking forward to.

“How?” Loki asks, his eyes as wild as the heart beating under Tony’s hand. “When?”

“You will know,” Tony promises. “When the beacons are lit and the fireworks ensue… you will know. I’ll be waiting.”

When it’s later than it’s polite, Tony changes into his sharpest suit and walks into the golden castle. Today, he feels like Stark. Sharp, as if he will draw blood if someone touched him. He can finally see the words the way Loki can.

Because the name Odin tastes like ash left behind after the fire has burned too long and can’t burn any longer. It tastes like prey.

He already knows what Loki tastes like—he still can still feel the tang of it on his tongue from this morning—like the sea, strong and merciless, the kind that can douse any fire, the kind that can swallow the sun. Loki tastes like retribution.

Tony schmoozes. It’s what he has learned to do best. And here he is the star of the party, every eye lingering on him—the savior of Asgard—clad in a suit as black as Loki’s hair and a tie as red as the rubies around Loki’s neck.

The Odin King doesn’t greet him; the Odin King doesn’t greet anybody. He sits on his gold throne that never rusts, that would never float on the water—is too dense for it—and looks imperiously at the people through his one eye with barely hidden contempt, and Tony is glad for it. Glad for the fact that he doesn’t have to meet the King whose name tastes of ash, because he doesn’t know if he will be able to resist the urge to gouge out his other eye as well… doesn’t know if he will be able to wait for Loki to finish the job.

“My husband says you are the one we have to thank for the feast today…” He hears a soft and polite voice, completely stranger except in all the ways that remind him of a voice that’s anything but. “And for the wall that you build for him.”

He turns around to see a woman walking towards him in a graceful fluid motion that’s so achingly familiar that he wonders how she didn’t give birth to the boy that’s not her son—the boy that she abandoned—and wonders if that would’ve made a difference; if she would’ve fought harder for a son born out of her womb. He smiles, and it cracks around his mouth, and splinters in his eyes, sharp like his name.

“I didn’t do it for him,” he says and raises her hand to his lips to the back of it. It’s dry, and doesn’t smell of sea. “Lady Frigga.”

When he pulls back, Frigga’s eyes linger on the emerald ring on his finger, the one he chose to forge especially because it reminded him of the color of Loki’s eyes. He hopes it reminds her of the same.

The humans are tedious to deal with, with their forged smiles and the false words. The ocean never pretends to be what it’s not, and Tony longs to be back there… longs to be back home. So his eyes linger on the clock, counting down the minutes, and towards the horizon he can’t see in the dark, and even if it were light, there is a wall between him and what he yearns for. He built it.

“Who do you look for, Man of Iron?” a voice says and it rumbles like the thunder… it rumbles like the ocean. Tony doesn’t turn around this time, for he knows he would face the man wearing a cape the color of Tony’s tie, the color of rubies around Loki’s neck, the color of blood he has spilled in the wars he has won.

“Who do you?” he asks instead, and lets Thor stand next to him as the countdown is finally over. They both try and look for the horizon that’s beyond their sight as the sky above them bursts in color.

When the beacons are lit, and the fireworks start lighting up the sky… the wall collapses.

Tony Stark is a builder. There are some things he knows instinctively. Like holding a hematite in his hand and knowing if it will bend to his will or break in the process; like knowing that a building is only as strong as its foundations; and like knowing that giant structures made of iron and steel may look solid, but water penetrates it, changes it, weakens the metal at its very core and makes it brittle. The water always wins.

Tony never meant to fight the sea anyway.

So when the pretty but useless explosions color the dark sky where the full moon looms disdainfully, another kind happens in dark crevices deep beneath in the very foundations of the lie that was the wall, because it never intended to keep the water out.

And the water comes rushing in.

Loki watches the sky and waits for the fire, and yet in the end, what tips him off doesn’t come from above where the moon watches, but it rumbles from within, deep inside the ocean where even he is afraid to linger too long.

It feels a lot like it did the first time he jumped in the water and let the tides carry him. It feels like freedom.

The full moon makes the sea long for what it can’t have, leaping up and lashing out, aching. It resonates with the ache in Loki’s chest, and Loki has always been beloved of the sea, so if the sea can’t have the moon, it will use that longing to give Loki what he wants.

And what Loki wants is revenge.

The land of Asgard is as dry and parched as ever, drier, even the rain having deserted it for the crimes it has done against the sea, the land welcomes the sea like an old friend with open arms. Loki barely spares a thought for the people living on the surface he is racing through—he could condemn them to fate that they have brought upon themselves, for silence against cruelty is a cruelty as well, but he remembers that somewhere on this land lives Tony’s friend, remembers the way Tony’s eyes reflect the sun’s warmth when he talks about him. So he wills the water to stay closer to the surface, requests it fall gentle against things that are too soft to bear its wrath, and begs it to carry the beating hearts on its surface rather than swallowing them whole.

He will spare the lives he can, because there is only one that he wishes to take… only one that would sate the hunger in his heart… and he doesn’t want to dull his appetite for when the time comes.

As the golden castle shakes with the violence of the destiny that has finally arrived, the Odin King closes his one remaining eye and feels like a prey chained to a throne made of gold that could never float. He had tried to run from it, but he had been surrounded by the waters where he was unwelcome… there was nowhere to run to. In trapping his bane he had forgotten to consider that he was trapping himself as well.

The day Loki had gouged his eye, the day he had bound him to the sea, he should’ve known that this is how it would end. This is how it always ends. Nowhere in any story does fire defeat water… nowhere in any story has anything defeated water. The sun always sets, and the moon always wanes, and the water always wins.

He watches his queen gasp when she hears it… later than him, but before the rest of the people and when she turns towards the closed door, her eyes are not scared… they are hopeful. Love is more powerful than fear can ever be. She fears him, but she has always loved Loki.

He doesn’t know love, because you can’t receive what you don’t give, but he knows fear… and right now it rattles his bones and chills his blood, and he finally understands that he was always living on stolen time.

Then the doors of the golden castle budge under the onslaught of water before giving in and bursting open, and Odin knows his time is up.

The Odin King.

He sits on the throne and watches passively from the one eye Loki failed to gouge out from its socket. He doesn’t even stand to greet the boy he condemned for a crime he had not yet committed; the boy who grew up and has finally arrived to earn his sentence.

Loki isn’t fooled. He can hear the throb of a heart beating, too loud and too fast. He can taste the fear in Odin’s name along with the ash and the blood. He knows why Loki’s here. He knows what Loki’s owed.

He holds the water back until it’s only a shallow puddle on the floor of the castle grounds, and leaves the rest of it roaring outside, restless but patient, waiting for Loki to take his time, to take his revenge. Then he makes the shift he hasn’t made in centuries… the shift he couldn’t make in centuries, and stands on legs he once stood on, a long time ago. The form doesn’t quite fit him right, except in all the ways it does. He still remembers how to use it.

So he walks. Walks towards the golden throne with its golden king whose heart is blacker than the heart of the ocean where no light can penetrate. The water is already reaching forward into his open palm, solidifying into a spear in the shape of Gungir Odin is holding in his hand, pointed and sharp… deadly. He has heard the birds whisper about a rebel who once thrust a spear into Odin’s chest and the King laughed and pulled it out and thrust it back into the rebel’s throat.

Loki wants to see him try and do the same when the icy rage of the ocean is embedded in his heart.

Just when his grip tightens and he raises his hand, just when he is close enough to see the terror in the eye of a father he never had, a voice stops him,

“Brother,” it says.

“I am not your brother,” he whispers, audible to only himself. Yet he lowers his spear and his gaze, stares at the water under his feet, hating the way his heart constricts.

“Brother, it really is you.” The voice comes closer, boisterous and loud and everything Loki hates, and everything Loki loves.

“I am not your brother,” he says, and turns around, his voice as cold as the spear in his hand and just as sharp. “I never was.”

The face he had despised for how much he missed it over the years flinches at that, and Loki feels viciously pleased at that, even as hates himself for it. But Thor—the one who was made to stand tall and walk on the ground, where Loki belonged to water; the one who the sun kissed at birth where Loki was born under the light of the moon—still as stubborn as Loki remembers, as he had tried to forget, because surely his stubbornness wouldn’t have let Odin keep him away from looking for him, from rescuing him. And yet, in this instance, Thor takes a deep breath and his eyes harden and warm at the same time, as he ignores Loki’s words.

“Brother,” he whispers, sincere in a way he doesn’t deserve to be. “I thought you dead.”

If this were a sailor or a pirate captain, if Loki were in the sea at the moment, he would’ve called a maelstrom without hesitation, because this was worse than the lies, worse than the truths, worse than the barrage of arrows that wouldn’t pierce his skin. This _hurt_. “Did you mourn?”

“We all did.”

And Loki laughs. It sounds wretched to his own ears, the way wind sometimes laughs in the empty ocean and chases away the birds. Thor doesn’t fly away in alarm like the birds do, the fool, and instead reaches forward to grasp Loki’s hand. Loki flinches violently, not knowing whether Thor would be the one to crumble at the touch, or Loki himself, and not willing to find out. Not yet. Not while Odin breathes and stands just a few feet away.

He closes his eyes and fists his hands, trying to turn his heart back into the frozen ice that nothing could thaw, that nothing could melt.

“Loki,” the woman who he wishes were a little crueler, a little more like her husband, easier to resent, calls, and the ice cracks. “My son.”

“Don’t call me that.” Loki’s voice shakes like his shoulders do, and he doesn’t know whether it’s an order or a plea.

“Lo—“

He doesn’t look at her, because if he does he will crack like the ice around his heart did, and instead he faces the Odin King again, the one man who hasn’t opened his mouth to greet his lost son home. He stands now, so much shorter than Loki remembers, and his mouth is a grim, harsh line. Loki tightens his grip on the spear again, wanting it done already, wanting it to be over.

He will soon find out if Frigga still calls him a son with blood of her husband on his teeth.

“How does it feel, Odin King,” he spits out the name, “to have nowhere to run.”

At least he doesn’t do Loki the offense of fake greetings, of fake apologies. “I was only doing what was right.”

“Liar.” Loki stalks forward, feeling the same wrath he felt for all the lies the sailors told hm. “You were only doing what was selfish.”

“Maybe,” Odin nods, and then continues, “but you always loved the sea.”

That is true. He has always loved the sea, and he always will. It doesn’t made what he did _right._

“And the only person you’ve always ever loved is yourself. So that’s what I’ll take from you… your life, for the crime of taking away my birthright.”

“Your birthright was to die.” Odin is done with the pretenses now, his face contorted in the reflection of the ugliness in his heart. “I saved you, raised you, and this is how you repay me?”

“That was your first mistake, wasn’t it?” Loki whispers, and yet it echoes in the room. “You don’t save monsters and expect them to play nice.”

Odin opens his mouth to say something, to defend himself or to curse Loki, but Loki is done playing, he is done waiting. He is done.

The water outside is desperate for the blood it is owed, and Loki can’t deny it any longer.

“Don’t do it Loki… He isn’t worth it.” Frigga’s voice pierces his focus, and he turns his eyes and tilts his gaze because _this,_ he has to see.

“Really, _Mother_?” he sneers at the women who has eyes the color of the sky on a clear day that always made him ache for something he would rather forget. “Even now, you beg for your husband’s life?”

“I don’t ask it for him.” She comes closer. “I ask it for you. You don’t deserve to have his blood on your hands.”

Loki holds his empty palm up, showing it to her. “There’s more blood on my hands than the whole ocean can wipe away.”

“I don’t see it.” She grasps his hand and holds it in both of her own, warm in a way he has forgotten, seeping through him, thawing his skin, his cracked heart. “I only see my son.”

She squeezes his hand and Loki squeezes his eyes against the warmth that wants to spill from them and paint his cheeks, unable to help as the spear in his hand melts against a force it can’t compete with and turns into water.

“Welcome home, son,” Frigga wipes away the traitorous tear that spilled on his cheek despite his efforts. He leans into the touch, and thinks maybe, maybe, he can write his own destiny.

“ _Loki_!”

Then he hears the panicked call of his name in a voice that taught him the alphabets of hope long after he had forgotten them, and lets go.

Tony watches as the crowd at the feast trembles at the roar of the ocean they have never heard, have never befriended, and smirks.

He doesn’t fear the ocean’s wrath, because he isn’t the one who has wronged it.

And when Loki comes barging through the doors like a storm unstoppable, like destiny unavoidable, he barely holds back the urge to go down on one knee and swear fealty.

Soon, he promises himself, soon he can do exactly that.

But Loki is temperamental like a cat, temperamental like the ocean, and no matter how much angry he is, he has been longing for a family a lot more than he’s been longing for revenge. His brother calls his name and Tony can see it break him like a wave breaks against the sand shore, and can see him melt like the ice melts under the sun when his mother touches him.

In the end, Loki is defeated by warmth and softness. It was always going to be like this.

He is so immersed in watching the man he loves being molded and shaped and remade by the very people who broke him that he almost forgets about the danger, about the reason Loki was broken in the first place.

He sees it a fraction too late: Odin is throwing his golden spear at Loki, just as the one in Loki’s hand melts into the water on the floor.

“Loki,” he screams, panicked and angry, too late to stop the spear, too late to warn him, too late to save the man who wears his colors around his neck.

The rest of his scream is swallowed by the howl of the ocean as it breaks down the barriers holding it back, and takes what it is owed.

Loki has always been beloved of the sea. Loki has always belonged to it, even when he needed air to breathe and had lungs that couldn’t filter water.

And while the sea loves the way it is, selfless and endless, it is also merciless towards those that aim to harm its own.

So the Gungir doesn’t meet Loki’s heart where it is aimed. It meets the heart of the sea instead. And the heart of the sea can swallow anything and hunger for more. The sea has felt Loki’s thirst for Odin’s blood, and shared it, so it takes what Loki spared. It grabs Odin by his ankle and drags him into its dark depths where the light of the sun doesn’t shine, shackled to the golden throne that cannot float.

Then it retreats after caressing Loki’s bare feet in a goodbye kiss, back to the shores that no longer hold it back, content in the knowledge that the sea is beloved of Loki too.

The silence that follows is almost too loud to bear.

And then Tony Stark steps forward and breaks it.

“The King is dead,” he says. “Long live the King.”

Loki looks around as the people bend down on one knee and look up at him. He can hardly breathe as his lungs choke on thin air the way they never did in the water.

This isn’t what he wants. He isn’t made to be shackled to a throne any more than he is made to be bound to the sea. He has only just found his legs back, and he wants to walk on them.

His eyes search for the ones the color of earth that sucked him in like a quicksand from the first day. When he finds them, he sees Iron Man smile, then turn into Stark who winks at him, and then for the first time he understands why he’s called Tony when he lowers his eyes and sinks to the floor and holds out his hand to swear fealty to the new King.

Tony tastes like warm lips pressed against his chest, like strong arms wrapped around him that never make him feel trapped. Tony tastes like love and salvation. Tony tastes quite frighteningly like _his._

Loki can’t bear the sight for another moment.

He turns around and walks away, not knowing where it is he wants to go. He has been Odin’s Bane for so long that he doesn’t know how to be Loki anymore. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he does know that it’s not _this._

“Loki,” that voice has always been an anchor, much like the one that he wears in his ear, “Please don’t go.”

“I am not what you think I am, Iron Man. I am no King.”

“Nor are you a monster,” he can feel the warm breath against his shoulder as the words are spoken and he barely stops himself from leaning back, from letting those lips press against his skin.

“Then what am I?” Tony doesn’t answer. Instead he gently touches his arm and turns him around, treating him like one would a fragile glass. Loki thinks he will break easier than that. “What am I, Tony?”

Tony’s eyes widen at the name he has never taken before, but he can’t explain it to him right now, not while the turmoil in his heart threaten to overwhelm him. “I need to go,” Loki says, and it comes out as a plea.

“Take me with you.”

Loki shakes his head, trying to make the mortal understand. “I am not going back to the sea… I am, not sure where it is I’m headed. I am neither the monster that you made a promise to, nor am I the king that you hoped I would be. I am nothing… just, let me go.”

Tony, the infuriating, reckless idiot just tightens his grip on Loki’s shoulder and insists, “Take me with you.”

“I told you I’m not going back to the sea,” Loki shrugs off his hands and let his voice become louder. “You love the sea. It is your home; you said so. You can’t tell me otherwise, and I can’t do it. Not even for you.”

“Oh, Loki,” Tony says, and looks like his heart is breaking. “Don’t you know… haven’t you figured it out?”

Loki fails the battle of staying afloat and drowns in sheen of water in Tony’s eyes as he says, “You _are_ my sea.”

From a golden castle deep inside Asgard, where the windows are always open to catch any stray sea breeze, rules Thor. He is rarely found within the castle though, preferring to walk closer to the shores where the salt air can ruffle through his sun kissed hair. They say he communes with the water spirits, and that is why the rain has come back to the land it had abandoned; that’s why they sleep with their bellies full.

It is only half the truth.

On a rock that faces the ocean, with its windows made of glass, is a house that once belonged to the man of iron. They say a water spirit took it over, that it dragged the man of iron into the ocean and turned him into one of its own too. That on a day when the moon is full and the tides are high, you can sometimes see them going down to the beach, their laughs sounding like the waves lapping against the shore.

It is only half the truth.

The whole truth is too wondrous for the people to believe, too surreal to stomach, so they shroud it in mystery and myth, until what is true becomes a fairytale parents tell their children about at night. The tale that in a kingdom far away, there once lived a young prince that was condemned to the ocean by a cruel king for no crime of his own, until he was helped by a mortal to take his revenge. That during the process, the mortal and the prince fell in love with the sea, and then with each other. That at the last moment, the prince’s heart softened, and he spared the life of the one that wronged him. But the sea doesn’t forgive that easily so it dragged the cruel king deep within itself, until he was neither alive nor dead, where he will be tormented for all the rest of turns of the earth, until the sun bursts and the ocean dries up.

The tale that the prince and the mortal lived happily ever after, and so did the rest of the people of the kingdom ruled by a fair king, and counseled by the one who has the favor of the sea.

Sometimes, on particularly dark nights, when the ocean is restless and angry for all the blood it has had to wipe away over the centuries, one can hear a wail from its depths that sounds almost human. The waters are dangerous then, and the ships that dare traverse it are caught in a maelstrom that they can’t escape.

There’s a saying that nobody really says, but anyone who has ever been to the sea on the nights like these knows of it nonetheless.

It says, remember the name of the sea’s beloved, because anyone coming with that name on their lips is granted safe passage through the waters, and the tortured spirit trapped within it has no control over the waves once his name is invoked.

And his name is Loki.

“Does the Odin King live?” Loki asks sometimes, when he wraps his arms around Tony from behind and presses his nose to the back of his neck, breathing him in.

Tony laughs then, and turns around to twist his fingers in Loki’s hair to bring him down for a kiss.

“Does it matter?” he asks in response before pressing their mouths together and tasting the drying salt water on Loki’s lips, until they both forget about the question in the first place.

And that, he supposes, is all the answer they both need.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic didn't let me rest, quite literally. I haven't slept properly in DAYS... but it was worth it. I hope you all enjoy reading it <3\. If you do... leave me a note telling me. Pretty please. ♥


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